A popular user-created RTS modof Blizzard called Defense of the Ancients, or DOTA, focused on multiple players with teams controlling single, powerful units instead of large and complex armies. In fact, they emerged from one game in particular: Warcraft III.
MOBAs started as an offshoot of real-time strategy games. MOBA battlefields are top-down and mouse-driven, like strategy games, but players only control one unit at a time. Despite modest beginnings as a modified offshoot of real-time strategy games, these titles have exploded at the forefront of PC gaming, winning tens of millions of players and a place at the top of the eSports world (blech *). Multiplayer online combat arenas, or MOBAs, refer to a very specific subset of top-down strategy-based titles.
